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Magazines & Newspapers in Crisis

I learned a few weeks ago that PC Magazine, a periodical to which I have long subscribed, will no longer be delivered to my door. The magazine has ceased printing. It will still be published, but only online. I'm not especially bothered. It's certainly a bit sad to lose a magazine that shaped my attitude towards computers to the extent that I'm blogging at my own website today. Still, I'm subscribed to other magazines; my mailbox won't be empty. Besides, I have to acknowledge that I get most of my computing knowledge online now anyway.

The cause of PC Magazine's transformation is simple, and though it might seem appropriate for a magazine about computers to go all-digital, the real reason has less to do with innovation than it does with cost. A digital publication is far less expensive to produce than an ink and paper one, and PC Magazine's parent company, Ziff Davis Media, declared bankruptcy last spring. The reasons cited were declining subscriptions and lost advertising revenue. This isn't just one isolated magazine publisher falling to the wayside, however. The whole print media industry seems to be in the midst of a dramatic transformation.

Take the Christian Science Monitor, a paper well known for its independent focus on international issues. The Monitor reached its one hundredth anniversary last year only to announce in October that is planning to cease daily publication this spring. A weekly edition of the newspaper will still be printed, but daily reports will only be available online after April 2009.

Consider also the Detroit Free Press, the nation's twentieth largest newspaper by circulation, which declared in December that it will cease home-delivery of its daily papers early this year. The daily will still be available at newsstands and online, but home deliveries will only be made on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Why is this happening? "Economics," answers a FAQ page at the paper's website. "Advertising, including classified, is down. Costs are up. We are changing our model in order to survive in a world that has changed."

A look at newspaper publishers' share prices shows how dire their economic situation is. The Detroit Free Press is published by Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper company, which also owns the USA Today and Wisconsin papers like the Green Bay Press-Gazette and Appleton Post-Crescent. It's share price was $59.63 on January 9, 2007. Two years later, on January 9, 2009, it stood at $8.59—an 85.6% decline.

Lee Enterprises, an Iowa-based national conglomerate whose local papers include the Wisconsin State Journal and La Crosse Tribune, has seen its shares fall from $30.32 to $0.53 over the same time frame. That's a decline of 98.3%.

Similarly, shares in the McClatchy Company have dropped from $41.09 to $1.47 during this two-year span, a decline of 96.4%. McClatchy's newspapers around the country include the Miami Herald and Sacremento Bee.

Most strikingly, the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, declared bankruptcy this December. Only one year before, it had been purchased by investor Sam Zell for $34.00 per share—a total price tag then of $8.2 billion.

What's killing print media?

The Internet is, of course, often listed as the principal assassin. That's part of the reason why publishers are shifting their focus to the web now. My generation gets its news online, so we aren't subscribing to newspapers. Advertisers, looking to reach the most eyeballs, are shifting their spending towards the Internet. The result is a double-whammy for newspaper printers: both subscribers and advertisers are taking their attention elsewhere. It's all a bit silly on the advertising front—download the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox like I have, and you'll never see one of those annoying Internet ads again. So much for reaching eyeballs. But I digress.

Many also blame the print media's downfall on the fact that, like real estate and finance, newspapers have recently gone through a bubble that's burst. In the past few years, many publishing conglomerates took advantage of easy credit to acquire more newspapers and expand, only to be struck by sweeping declines in their business and then by a credit-tightening financial crisis. Now these companies are collapsing under their own debt. The Tribune Company, for instance, went bankrupt largely because of it's purchase by Sam Zell in 2007. Zell's privatization of the company was funded by highly-leveraged debt, and after the credit crunch, that debt is simply no longer sustainable. Likewise, Lee Enterprises took on tremendous debt in 2005 to acquire Pulitzer, Inc., and it too is teetering on the brink of failure, as I've been reading lately at Waxing America. The McClatchy Company is also largely a victim of it's debt-funded acquisition of publisher Knight-Ridder in 2006.

In some ways, I'm not sure that this trouble for the aforementioned companies is a bad thing. Media-consolidation is something I'm firmly opposed to, and to see companies collapse because they've consolidated too quickly seems a rather just desert. What good is a local paper, after all, when its owned by a national chain from out of state? It's bad enough that every town's main street has turned into the same assemblage of Wal-Mart stores and McDonald's restaurants! To see city newspaper after city newspaper transform into the same bland blend of AP wires and syndicated features is the ultimate disgrace to local identity. If a city doesn't even own its own news, then what has it got?

More to the point, why would anyone subscribe to a local paper anymore when it isn't local? It's no wonder that people turn to the Internet for their news when their hometown paper just duplicates the same national feeds as news.yahoo.com, spruced with a few local updates of the most dispassionate variety. It's true that bloggers who try to cover the news are not usually professional journalists, and that certainly shows in their work. At the same time, these bloggers are not usually owned by a corporation from across the country either, and that shows too. The success of the Internet is not only because of its convenience and interactivity, but also because it is so often open and uncontrolled, enabling it to be far more independent than the national media.

I think it would be fitting for newspaper companies, if they must fail, to be brought down by their own overzealous expansion. I'd be thrilled if the result of all this was the breakup of conglomerates and a return to more locally owned papers. I would hate, however, for print media to disappear entirely. It's too important. What the Internet gains in freedom, it generally lacks in discipline. What it gains in convenience, it lacks in depth. Some bloggers break news stories, but many (like me) simply offer opinions on what real journalists have printed. Besides, Internet-access is still not universal, and web pages are certainly not renowned for longevity. To stop printing newspapers is to starve the poor of knowledge and to pillage the future of its history. We need printed newspapers and magazines. But it's equally clear that these publications must change if they are to survive.

4 Replies to "Magazines & Newspapers in Crisis":

Eric wrote:

14 January 2009 — 11:36 am

I think it is survival of the fittest. Customers use what they want to use. Telegraphing is not that important anymore. Steam engines are not that important anymore. If any company wants to survive, they have to adapt to their customers. The “Big Three” are failing because they have not adapted to their customers. And yes, it is very sad to see magazines and newspapers to go, but soon everything will be on the internet. My mother did not even go shopping for Christmas, it was done all on the internet. The internet is a recently new phenomenon compared to newspapers and I do agree that everyone is getting their opinion out there; however, since it is new, it will not be perfected as the newspapers have been, i.e. professional, current, and local. That will take some time. In fact, I am watching a talk show about “The Internet Has Taken Over My Life.” People getting addicted to Facebook and Myspace, but I think since the internet is so new, nothing will be perfect for a while. Cars were interesting when they first came out. Trains were interesting. Fads are interesting.

Survival of the fittest, perhaps so—but I’m not sure “fittest” is as cut and dry as it looks. I firmly agree that many newspapers have not adapted well to changes in their customers’ wants or changes in technology, so their struggles are somewhat justified. Mightn’t print publications and internet publications each be best fit for different things, though? Mightn’t print be a better fit for some people and the Internet a better fit for others? Need it be one or the other?

I don’t think the Internet will just gradually improve to the point where it has all of the qualities of print. To use your example, automobiles may have overtaken railroads in our country for transportation, and automobiles bring great freedom and convenience, but they do not and will never equal the safety and capacity of trains. Cars, compared to trains, are inefficient, polluting, and more expensive to use—you usually have to buy or rent a car, but you only need a ticket to ride a train. Likewise, the Internet has tremendous strengths—it is fast, it is convenient, it allows for independent thinking and discussion and I think it is already more local than corporate media. But the very nature of the Internet—hypertext: links and speed and motion—discourages deep ponderous thought. The very nature of the Internet—search engines, for example—put a wealth of information at people’s fingertips, but restricts their awareness of subjects they aren’t already looking for. The very nature of the Internet means that to access it, one must have and know how to use expensive equipment and gadgetry. Newspapers are just there: you have them and you can read them until, after centuries or millenniums, they’ve crumbled away. So which is really “fittest”? And is the fad-driven whim of customers really the best mechanism to decide?

Eric wrote:

15 January 2009 — 11:28 am

I agree that it might not be the “fittest,” but majority rules with what customers want. If a company only serviced a minority, it would not stay afloat; I think that it was I mean by “survival of the fittest.” Not necessarily the best way to receive news, but the one that will survive because more customers want it that way.

I don’t know that companies need a majority of customers, they just need enough to continue making a profit. Your point is spot on, though—if customers abandon newspapers then newspapers will not survive. I think newspapers as they’re currently set up are dependent on having lots of readers, because newspapers try to be everthing to everybody—printing daily about world, national, state, local affairs; sports, weather, business, lifestyle, entertainment. As they lose readers, they can’t afford to keep all this up. I think that if they want to stay in business, they have to scale back from the extemporaneous features and focus their resources on local issues, on investigative reporting, and on deep analysis—and maybe not every day anymore. They will save money by only covering what matters, and though the number of subscribers might still dwindle, those who remain would likely pay a premium to get good quality reporting on the things they’re really interested in—real journalism about their own hometowns.

I don’t think it should be a question of newspapers either staying as they are or disappearing altogether in favor of the internet. I keep going back to this idea, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. If they would focus on their own strengths, then both might retain enough customers to make a profit, because they would be fundamentally different services. If, however, they both try to do the exact same thing, then customers will decide between them and one will succeed while the other fails.

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